Oscar Micheaux, out of whose impoverished consciousness-raising exploitation potboilers (e.g. God’s Stepchildren) the American black cinema was born, is the responsible hand behind this 1935 mystery tale involving corpses and mysterious letters and flashbacks and Byzantine plot twists, all of which should undoubtedly prove taxing to Micheaux’s meager technical abilities. It hardly matters though, since Micheaux was his own cinematic institution; there are lots of reasons for seeing his films—sociological, historical, etc—besides their entertainment value (or lack of same).
